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4 Nov 2009 : Column 279WH—continued
Probation is not an easy service to work in, or an easy job to do. Over the past 10 years, there has been a big increase in resources, but there has also been a big increase in work load-I do not think that there is any question about that. It depends on exactly which figures
we look at, but I get the impression from some of the available statistics that the increase in work load has outstripped the increase in resources.
A report produced last year, which I know some hon. Members will have seen, by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's college examined what has happened to probation staffing and work load over the past few years. It found that between the creation of the national probation service in 2001 and 2006-07, the budget had increased in real terms by 21 per cent., which is a significant increase, and that the number of staff had increased by 37 per cent. However, in that same period, the number of fully professionally qualified probation officers had fallen. So although there have been big increases in the number of less qualified staff-probation service officers-and in managerial staff, the overall increase in staff numbers actually masks a significant change in the composition of the work force.
During that period, the ratio of offenders to fully qualified probation officers therefore rose from 31:1 to 40:1. We would not see the shift in that ratio if we simply considered total staff numbers, but as far as fully qualified professional staff are concerned, there has been a significant increase in that ratio. I notice that a parliamentary question on the ratio of probation officers to offenders was answered just last month. It was interesting to note the variation from one area to another that was revealed by the answer. For example, in Rutland, Leicestershire, the ratio of offenders to probation officers is 10.5:1, which is the lowest in the country. By the way, that figure relates to all probation staff, not just the fully qualified. The ratio is 10.6:1 in Norfolk, 22:1 in London, 20.4:1 in Greater Manchester and 21.4:1 in Devon and Cornwall, so the issue does not just affect big city areas. There is significant regional variation in those ratios, and that must impact on the work loads in those different areas.
In conversations that I have had in the past few months, particularly with probation officers, it has come through regularly that people feel that their work load is too heavy, and that there are too many relatively inexperienced staff who have to deal with complex and difficult cases. As has been mentioned, from what I know of the Sonnex case, the person who was given the responsibility of dealing with Sonnex was relatively inexperienced and was not given sufficient support and supervision. As the Minister said, there were clearly management failings, but that was the situation in which that probation officer had been left, and it was an extremely difficult position to be in. Probation officers keep telling me that such a scenario is not uncommon, and that too many people are in that situation.
There are also concerns about the IT systems; for example, the offender assessment system has been mentioned. Of course, an important part of the work is ensuring that there are appropriate reports and records, but probation officers say that it takes a long time to do a report for a single individual using OASys. They would like it to be streamlined, so that for each case, they can spend less time filling in the necessary data to produce a report through OASys.
For many probation staff, the worst thing is the worry about budget cuts. Last week, the Secretary of State announced that the budget for next year will show a smaller reduction than the indicative budget did, so I hope that some of the cuts that we were told about will
not happen. In the summer, staff from all over the country came to see us in Westminster, and the Minister came along to one of our sessions. From one region after another, we had reports of cuts, staff going and trainees not being offered jobs, and I hope that some of that will be dealt with by the change to the budget. People have been left feeling very uncertain about their futures-about whether there will be redundancies and about whether trainees will have a job at the end of their training-and it is demoralising for people in any job to feel that degree of uncertainty.
The relationship between the work load and the budget is quite difficult, because although funding for the probation service comes via NOMS, and there are service-level agreements with the different probation areas, the size and nature of the work load is determined not by NOMS, but by the courts and the sentences that they give. It is difficult to strike a balance, which perhaps accounts for some of the regional variations that I mentioned. I appreciate that that causes difficulties, but if we look at where the service is now-at how it performs and at how the people who work in it feel-it is clear that it has been delivering, although it obviously needs adequate funding. More than anything, however, it needs stability, and the people who work in it need to have some confidence about their future. That is partly a matter of budgets, but it is not just about budgets.
Another issue is the introduction of the best-value framework. Some people are worried that best value will actually mean privatisation of some of the core work. We discussed that during the passage of the Offender Management Act 2007, and the Opposition Front Benchers' view was that it would be perfectly all right to privatise anything going. The Opposition argued that that should be done at local level, rather than regional or national level, but they had no problems with wholesale privatisation. In our discussions with the Secretary of State, we reached consensus on the point that we should not privatise core probation work. However, the announcements that have been made about best value in the past few months have made staff quite worried that there will be some backtracking, and that "best value" might turn out to mean privatisation by the back door.
We know that there are people around who would be quite happy to jump in, and I have real concerns about some of those who are starting to say that they want to be involved in running prisons. Some charities say that they want to do so, but that should not be part of their business. Charities do really good work in the criminal justice system by providing specialised services, such as treatment for drug and alcohol problems, and that is a perfectly reasonable function for them, but I do not want to see them delivering core services. That is a concern, and I hope that the Minister can give us some reassurance, when she replies, on how best value will operate. People are worried about their jobs and scared about what is happening to budgets, and adding the fear that privatisation is high on the agenda will make things worse.
I know of people who worked as probation officers, but who left the service because they were unhappy about the direction in which they perceived it to be going and were worried about what their future would be if they stayed in the service. We really cannot afford to lose experienced and skilled people from the service,
and some stability and certainty on budgets and job prospects would go a long way towards starting to persuade people that there really is a future for the service in which they have been working.
3.14 pm
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab): I want briefly to take up where my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard) left off. I am secretary of the justice unions parliamentary group, to which most Members present belong.
The issues before us have been raised constantly in debates over the past decade or so, but I want to start by reassuring the Minister of the commitment of those working in the service to the implementation of the original principles of NOMS, which were welcomed. The objective was a seamless service, in which fully resourced professionals with sufficient IT back-up could deal with an offender through every stage-pre-sentence, sentencing, imprisonment or community service, probation and rehabilitation back into society. That was the model to which everyone right across the service signed up.
From the beginning, however, we expressed concerns about a number of issues. The first was the lack of consultation about the involvement of the probation service in the development of NOMS. At the time, people thought that we were crying wolf, but the Select Committee on Justice report on the role of the prison officer, which has been published in the past week, makes an interesting point relating to NOMS. It quotes a probation officer, Cordell Pillay of NAPO, who reiterated a point that we have made in previous debates-that many people endorsed the idea of creating NOMS, but were critical of the practice. In one of his key criticisms, he said:
"From the outset there was not a clear structure or framework for NOMS, so there is no clarity from the probation perspective and no clarity from the prison perspective...There was no serious planning in relation to it. There was no real consultation."
That was one of the issues that we raised from the beginning. Interestingly, the Justice Committee concluded:
"We have seen no evidence that the creation of the National Offender Management Service has achieved the seamless end-to-end management of prisoners that was intended."
That reflects the views of those serving on the front line in the probation service, and we need to address that.
Another issue that we raised early on related to information technology and computer systems, which colleagues have mentioned. In the past week, the Public Accounts Committee has published its report on C-NOMIS-the national offender management information service-which completely endorses the criticisms that we have been raising since the early stages. The fact that the costs escalated from £234 million to £513 million under NOMIS, with delivery planned for 2011, confirms some of the early criticisms that we made. We heard from the unions about their concerns about the lack of involvement and consultation, the lack of proper management of the project and the lack of practical engagement with the staff who would eventually have to implement the system. It is not just a matter of "I told you so"; I mention all the critiques levelled by front-line staff because they have proved remarkably accurate.
Another issue that was raised-it has been raised again today-is the disparity between the Government's figures for the amount that has been invested in the service-the 70 per cent. increase-which we all welcome, and the amount that seems to have been translated into implementation by front-line staff. My hon. Friend mentioned the figures for staff recruitment. Although the argument is that there was a 53 per cent. increase in work load between 1997 and 2007 and a 70 per cent. increase in the budget, the information we have received from the front line, as my hon. Friend said, is that the investment has not produced the fully qualified and experienced staff that the service needs at the very front edge. Again, we need a detailed examination of where the resources have gone.
My colleague, the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd), argued that elements of levels and tiers of bureaucracy have been introduced in the service. We have raised such issues before, and sometimes they have been addressed. In the last round of budget reductions or re-examinations in the London service, certainly, a large number in the middle-management tier was taken out, and more money was applied to the front line.
That raises another issue. Apart from the fact that money did not seem to reach the front line in a form that effectively met casework needs, there has been turbulence in budget planning. Speaking as a London Member of Parliament, there was a period when we were having annual meetings with the Minister to resolve the London budget. We were seeing the prospect of trainees not being employed-before other areas, I believe. Only as a result of ministerial intervention on a number of occasions were we able to retreat from the inadequate proposed budget; we then arrived at a situation in which we were not involved with cuts on a scale that we felt would directly impact on service delivery.
The same happened nationally this year. We had discussions about the prospect of a £50 million cut-the Minister attended-and then consulted our NAPO members from the probation service. As my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow said, we received representations from area after area about the implications, which demoralised staff, who faced the prospect of trainees not being recruited and the potential that their jobs would be cut. Then, a week ago, it was no longer a £50 million reduction but a £24 million reduction. We are grateful that it is not £50 million, but that demonstrates a lack of consistent planning in budgets and introduces a turbulence in the system that undermines the effectiveness of the staff, and certainly their morale, in a number of areas of delivery.
What is needed now is a short, sharp exercise of standing back to see where we are in relation to the probation service and its budgets and their implementation vis-à-vis investment in front-line staff, and where we are going in terms of support services, in particular information technology. The Government need to get across to staff working in the field that a clear and consistent vision is being introduced in the coming period, that there will be stability and that they will have an important role not just in providing the service but in designing it as well-that they will be listened to. A consistent theme of the representations we received earlier this year, and
of more recent statements from NAPO, supported by the other justice unions, is that they do not feel fully listened to in the development of policy and its implementation.
I make this offer on behalf of the justice unions cross-party group: we are happy to organise for the Minister another one of our seminars, in which we stand back and look at where we are. We could invite more front-line representatives to discuss how our budget is translated into real investment in front-line delivery, not just in the coming year but over the forthcoming years as well, how we look at the tiers of management or bureaucracy and whether there is a need for rebalancing from those tiers towards the front line. We could also look at the long-term future in terms of investment in the IT systems that are needed. That might give us an opportunity of restoring confidence, among probation officers in particular, that the Government have a sense of direction, are listening and want to involve the staff we expect to deliver on the front line.
My hon. Friend mentioned some of the hard cases that have been dealt with. We put a burden on such staff, not setting them up to fail, but placing on them some of the hardest burdens of the justice system. At the same time they are vulnerable to criticism in a way that many other professionals may not be, because they are at the sharp end. It behoves us therefore to engage them in a process where we listen to them, so that we can implement the policies at least in the full knowledge of what they are experiencing at the front line.
3.24 pm
Paul Holmes (Chesterfield) (LD): I congratulate the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd)-my apologies if I have mangled the Welsh language-on securing the debate and on having outlined, as did the other speakers, the values of the probation service and the problems that it faces. Those problems are twofold: the cuts in funding of 2.68 per cent. and the increase in case load at the same time. In Derbyshire, for example, the two-year trainees who are approaching the end of their training are effectively being told that there are no jobs for them to move on to. Out of the existing 400 staff, Derbyshire has to lose 30 by March, as well as not being able to take on the trainees who have completed their work.
As we have already heard, the Minister will say that there has been a 70 per cent. real-terms increase in probation funding between 1997 and 2007. That is true enough, but there are two points, which we have already heard discussed. First, we are talking about cuts now, not increases in spending in years gone by. Secondly, when the increases took place after 1997, at the same time there were real increases in case load; the bare case load went up from 159,200 in 1997 to 243,400 in 2007-08. Yes, there were real-terms increases in funding, but there were also real increases in case load, partly because the prison population is up by more than 60 per cent. since 1997-we now lock up more people per head of population than any other country in Europe. That has a concomitant effect on the work of the probation service, with people coming out of prison as well as others being given non-custodial sentences in an attempt to keep them out of our already chock-a-block and overcrowded prisons.
We are, therefore, demanding more of the probation service, not just in basic case load but in terms of the quality of what we now expect it to do with people-the work on monitoring, rehabilitation and community punishment orders that we expect it to deliver. As we have heard a number of people say, probation actually works. We are not defending the existing system just because it exists, but because it works. There are hard statistics to prove that it works.
On 19 August this summer when, according to the press, all MPs were lazing around on a warm beach at exotic locations around the world, I spent the day with the probation service in Derbyshire. I hope that I will be forgiven if a number of my examples are parochial to Derbyshire, but they illustrate the national picture and fit in with the examples that we heard from previous speakers. During that day, which was very full and intense, I spent time with managers, front-line probation officers, victim support staff, community payback staff, education and training and employment staff, the drug and alcohol team, and the accredited programme staff, who deliver behavioural management courses and so forth. It was the works-an incredibly intense day.
One overwhelming message came out of meeting all those people that day. Not once in the entire day did any of the members of staff that I met complain about pay or the usual things that we tend to hear about, rather they emphasised-it shone through in what they were doing-their immense pride in what they were doing. They believed implicitly in the value of their work in benefiting the community and turning people's lives around. They were imbued with a public service ethos, which some journalists and politicians find hard to understand when they see the world only in the light of people being incentivised to do anything if they are in a bonus culture and receive bonus payments.
When I was a teacher, the Government of the day tried to introduce bonuses into teaching-the only way that teaching could be improved was to start offering teachers bonuses and incentives, totally ignoring why so many people had entered a public service profession in the first place. Those probation staff whom I met, across the board reminded me of that over and over again. They were so full of passion for and pride in what they were doing, but frustrated with what they saw was stopping them from doing the job as effectively as they might.
What specific examples did they raise? One that we looked at was the intensive alternatives to custody programme that has been run in Derbyshire. Derbyshire was the first of six pilots to introduce the programme as an experiment. It involves 100 hours of intervention with an offender each week, which is a lot of time to spend with one person; it covers curfew, supervision, education, mentoring, unpaid work and a range of other things appropriate to that individual. It is intensive and involves a lot of staff work, but it is very effective in reducing reoffending.
The pilot seems to reduce reoffending, but what is the cost of such staff-intensive work? I asked that question of the Derbyshire probation service, but it did not know the answer at the time. It did some calculations later, and sent me a letter showing the detailed costings. On a like-for-like basis, a 12-month programme for one offender on the intensive alternatives to custody programme would work out at £4,575 a year. The programme is
more effective in rehabilitating offenders and stopping reoffending than a prison sentence.
What is the alternative? Derbyshire probation service worked out that a full year's custodial sentence would be equivalent to £28,000 a year, yet a prison sentence would be less effective in preventing reoffending and delivering rehabilitation. Those figures were produced by the probation service. The Prison Reform Trust estimates that a year's custodial sentence can typically cost as much as £39,000, which would be an even starker contrast. However, even the Derbyshire figures show a huge difference in the ratio between the cost of prison and that of intensive intervention; and it can prevent a person from reoffending, get them back into work or education, into housing and whatever else is appropriate, including behaviour management, so that they do not reoffend and cause yet more misery in the community.
On cost grounds alone, it seems madness to endanger such an experiment in favour of the more expensive and less effective custodial sentence. That was the view of the front-line staff at Derbyshire probation service. It has long been the Liberal Democrats' view that prison policy should be based on evidence of what works effectively. That is also the view of that well-known left-winger, the former leader of the Conservative party, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith), who on 2 November published a report saying that prison sentences of less than two years should be scrapped entirely. He went on to explain that if the money was made available, the alternatives would be far more cost-effective and more effective in preventing reoffending.
Other examples considered on our day with Derbyshire probation service included the multi-agency public protection arrangements to which Members from other parts of the country have referred. Derbyshire is currently working with 700 sex offenders who were released from prison once their sentences had been completed and with more than 200 violent offenders. The programme started in 2001, and its record of nearly eight years shows that a low percentage of offenders absconds and a low percentage reoffends. They are dangerous people and a threat to the community. They may have come out of prison but they are still a danger; nevertheless, the programme has a high success rate with them. Not only is it cost-effective, but it prevents misery for the community by reducing later reoffending.
Community payback, which is now called community punishment, is another non-custodial sentence. I have visited three schemes in and around Chesterfield and seen offenders working in the community. On my latest visit, I spent time in the office talking to the staff who run the scheme. They deal mainly with young people, the unemployed and drug users, although when visiting them on site I have seen people in their 50s and people in employment.
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